Historic Maps

Dataset of the Week (Week 4)

Background

The Harvard Map Collection has a large number of historic, paper maps. You can visit them in person and a librarian will help you find a map that interests you and scan a copy of it. Make an appointment from this page:

Map Collection Appointments

I encourage you to visit the Map Collection in groups of three or four students (with related interests) so that we don’t overwhelm available appointments with our class.

Historic maps are a source of spatial data that can offer insight into what a place was like in the past, how it was perceived by those who made maps, and what mapmakers wished to communicate about places.

The maps that you create today serve a specific purpose, and this is true of historic maps as well.

Historic Maps of London (1854, 1898, 1914)

These three historic maps of London were each created at a different time for a different purpose.

John Snow’s Cholera Map (1854)

John Snow was an English doctor the time of an 1854 Cholera outbreak in the Broad Street region of London. Based on interviews with households with Cholera cases and his observations of water from a public pump located on Broad Street, he believed that the pump was the source of the outbreak. He created a map indicating the number of Cholera deaths at each address, and also showing the locations of public pumps. This map helped convince local officials to removed the handle from the Broad Street pump, which was followed by an immediate, sharp decline in Cholera cases.

Charles Booth’s Poverty Maps (1898)

Charles Booth was a successful London businessman in the Victorian era, and he was interested in the conditions of the poor. In 1884, while working on a project related to distributing funds for poverty relief, he became very unsatisfied with the usefulness of available census data for purposes of understanding poverty. In 1885, he came across work by socialist activist Henry Hyndman, which suggested that one in four Londoners lived in extreme poverty. He believed this was a gross overstatement of the extent of the problem, and the following year, he began work on his own detailed survey, which involved interviews with factory owners, school boards, and clergy.

The results was a detailed set of twelve map sheets that color-coded each street in London into one of seven categories:

  • Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal
  • Very poor, casual. Chronic want.
  • Poor. 18s to 21s a week for a moderate family.
  • Mixed. Some comfortable, others poor.
  • Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings.
  • Middle class. Well-to-do.
  • Upper-middle and Upper classes. Wealthy.

He ultimately concluded that Hyndman’s estimate was likely an understatement.

Max Gill’s Wonderground Map of London (1914)

In the early twentieth century, Frank Pick, general manager of the London Underground commissioned several artists to design subway posters as part of a publicity campaign. Among these was a map by MacDonald (Max) Gill that came to be known as the Wonderground map of London.

The text around the border of the map says, “By paying us your pennies, you go about your business in trams, electric trains, and motor-driven buses, in this largest of all cities, London by the Thames.”

W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits (1900)

In 1900, Thomas Calloway and Booker T. Washington persuaded the United States government to include an exhibit at the Exposition Universelle in Paris about the progress made by African Americans since Emancipation, which was in addition to other exhibits celebrating America’s industrial and political strength. Calloway invited W.E.B. Du Bois to contribute a social study of African American Life to the exhibit. Du Bois and his students at Atlanta University prepared two sets of infographics, which included maps. One of these focused specifically on Georgia, and the other focused on more national and global scales.1

The following three maps represent towns and counties in Georgia. Each map shows the spatial distribution of Black residents, represented as dots with colors (red, green, blue, and black) to classify people by social class. Yellow dots represent to approximate distribution of white residents.

Albany, Dougherty County, Georgia

McIntosh County, Georgia (outside of Darien)

Darien, McIntosh County, Georgia

  1. Battle-Baptiste, Whitney, and Britt Rusert, eds. 2018. W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. Amherst, Massachusetts New York: Princeton Architectural Press.↩︎